Translated by Charlotte Mandell<\/p>\n\n\n\n
French paperback with flaps, 352 pages<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Published 12 September 2024<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What is a place? A place where things happened, horrible things, the traces of which have been erased? Ukraine, for a long time, has been filled with these \u2018inconvenient places\u2019 which embarrass everyone, no matter which side of post-Soviet memorial politics they stand on: crimes of Stalinism, crimes of Nazism, crimes of nationalists, crimes of Russians; the killings follow one after another on this battered territory which aspires only to a form of peace and normality.
With the photographer Antoine d\u2019Agata, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Jonathan Littell began to survey Babyn Yar, the site of the 1941 massacre of the Jews of Kyiv, and the traces left on the landscape. The war came to interrupt their work. It resumed quite quickly in another form, in another place, the small suburban town of Bucha, which became infamous after the discovery of the atrocities perpetrated there by the Russian occupying forces. Again, a place where things happened; again, a place whose traces we erase as quickly as possible. How then to write, how to photograph, when there is literally nothing to see \u2013 or almost nothing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2018Of the three ways of observing \u2013 as witness, whose meticulous, dispassionate descriptions become the fabric of the past; as voyeur, devouring the sight of the present with limitless appetite; as seer, finding in the now intimations of things to come \u2013 Jonathan Littell chooses all three at once. He doesn\u2019t flinch from the bare, intimate detail of Russia\u2019s visitation of death and destruction on Ukraine. Although sometimes the reader might prefer it if he did, it\u2019s not because Littell\u2019s visions are naked of euphemism, but because it falls to the reader themself to clothe these events in meaning. With his companion d\u2019Agata, Littell, so fascinated by monuments, has made one with this book.\u2019 \u2018In An Inconvenient Place<\/em>, Jonathan Littell takes us on a journey into the most disturbing of modern human landscapes, from the jumble of horrors that were the ravines of Babyn Yar, into the cellars of Bucha. In chiselled, uncompromising prose, accompanied by haunting photographs by Antoine d\u2019Agata, Littell\u2019s unforgettable account is nothing less than a moral triumph over the willful amnesia imposed on history\u2019s savageries by its perpetrators.\u2019 \u2018An impressionistic rather than analytical book, it is not intended as a definitive account of Ukraine\u2019s recent history. That will be for historians to provide, and Jonathan Littell knows how quickly words can be reduced to irrelevance. He and Antoine d\u2019Agata have produced an insightful and frequently terrifying document whose reflections on depravity and resilience are likely to prove durable, come what may.\u2019 \u2018A narrative, both arduous and luminous, that takes every possible route through a history mired in tragedy.\u2019 \u2018What makes this powerful book so impressive is that it confronts everything \u2013 to the point of veering off course, of travelling far back into the past, of accumulating the twists, the strata, of narrative, image and investigation. At once a historical study, a testimony of the events unfolding as you read these lines, an inquiry into war crimes and a remembrance of the dead, it comes as close as possible to what its authors came to seek in the streets of Ukraine.\u2019 \u2018An important chronicle of the enigma of violence and evil, and the tragedy of the Ukrainian people.\u2019 \u2018Littell and d\u2019Agata, true aesthetes of disaster, document the history of the violence that stalks the fate of the Ukrainian people, now terrorized by the Russian army. The beauty of the book, embedded in its very tragedy, lies in its way \u2013 at once delicate and direct \u2013 of placing the ashes of this blood-streaked land into a literary urn, where nothing is forgotten, where everything captures the appalled gaze.\u2019 \u2018A singular and disturbing work that ties text to image\u2026 An Inconvenient Place<\/em> examines the war in Ukraine and draws its power from the interplay between the words of writer Jonathan Littell and the haunting images of photographer Antoine d\u2019Agata.\u2019 \u2018Littell excels at saying the unsayable, almost to a fault. An Inconvenient<\/em> Place<\/em> demands attentive reading; it battles against silence and oblivion.\u2019 Jonathan Littell was born in New York, and grew up in France. He now lives in Spain. His best-known novel, The Kindly Ones<\/em>, was originally published in French in August 2006, and won the most prestigious literary prize in France, the Prix Goncourt, as well as the Acad\u00e9mie Fran\u00e7aise\u2019s Grand Prix de Litt\u00e9rature. He has since published books on Chechnya, Syria, Francis Bacon, as well as a novel and several novellas. He has written for Le Monde<\/em>, the Guardian<\/em> and the London Review of Books<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Antoine d\u2019Agata is a French photographer born in Marseille in 1961. He studied photography at the International Center of Photography in New York City, under the tutelage of Larry Clark and Nan Goldin. D\u2019Agata joined Magnum Photos in 2004. He has published more than a dozen books, and directed three films.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Charlotte Mandell has translated over fifty books of fiction, poetry and philosophy from French, including works by Marcel Proust, Maurice Blanchot, Abdelwahab Meddeb and Jean-Luc Nancy, and the majority of Jonathan Littell\u2019s work, including The Kindly Ones<\/em>. Her translation of Compass<\/em> by Mathias \u00c9nard was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and was the recipient of the 2018 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose. She was recently named a Chevalier de l\u2019Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and has received the Thornton Wilder Translation Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2014 James Meek, author of To Calais, In Ordinary Times<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2014 Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2014 Luke Warde, Times Literary Supplement<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2014 T\u00e9l\u00e9rama<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2014 Le Monde<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2014 France Inter<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2014 Les Inrockuptibles<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2014 L\u2019Obs<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2014 Le Figaro Litt\u00e9raire<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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